Ugandan based San-Trac App wins global Sanitation competition award

San-Trac emerged as the clear winner of the Sanitation App Challenge People’s Choice Award. San-Trac is a sensor-driven system that provides audio hand washing reminders, collects hand washing data and transmits it via SMS to a remote server. From there data can be aggregated and viewed for insight about hand washing trends. The sensor system is solar powered, and provides a cell phone charging station for restroom users.

San-Trac onsite demo

The San-Trac team members were among over 1,000 mobile app developers who gathered in 40 cities around the globe on December 1 and 2, 2012, for the two-day Sanitation Hackathon event. At the event, civic technologists developed projects that address challenges facing the sanitation sector. TechPost live blogged the one which was held here in Kampala organized by Mara launchpad and hivecolab with Smile Communication and Nokia being the Sponsors in partnership with the World bank. The system, then called Toilet-Trac, emerged first place out of 8 teams that participated before taking on to the world stage.

Gathering information from the field is a slow process. Access to many communities in remote areas can be challenging. And processing information is very time consuming. The goal is to get automatic real-time, reliable data about WASH, Health and Education in schools, Hospitals. Offices and Public Places.

The App diverges from the usual Apps we’ve seen before by using a combination of custom hardware components — mainly infrared sensors, GPRS units — and software to collect, transmit and analyse data from remote sites to a central monitoring base. I caught with Mwebe Felix — the lead developer on the project to get me some more information on the award, but he assured me that there wasn’t enough information the same just yet.